Saturday, December 27, 2014

Guest post with author Jacqueline Rhoades

by Jacqueline RhoadesWhere do your ideas come from? How did you create the world your characters live in? I think every author out there is asked these questions at one time or another. Many authors will tell you they have people who live in their heads and speak to them on a regular basis. I’m one of those authors. Characters can annoy me to the point where I’ve had to set one book aside to write another, just to make that character quit bugging me!

But once I have that character shouting in my ear, what do I do with her? For that first book, I knew I wanted a paranormal setting, but what kind of creature was I looking for?

Now, my mind is a warehouse of odd information which is mostly useless unless you play Trivial Pursuit, which I don’t. The story of the Nephilim was buried somewhere in an overflowing closet tucked in the corner of my brain, in a shoebox marked ‘St. Augustine and Judaic Biblical References’. The sons of God (or Seth depending on the biblical authority) mated with the daughters of man. The behavior of the resulting offspring did not please God.

Whoa! There it was. The descendants of fallen angels became my Guardians, members of the race called Paenitentia, the Penitents. Their purpose is to protect the world from the demons that cross over from the Otherworld to wreak havoc in this one. Their curse is to live their lives in the dark, and if they suffer a violent death, they revert to the practices of their forefathers, the original vampires! By the way, those ancestors lived in the land of Canaan, the name I used for the first hero of the series.

The woman would be a Daughters of Man, endowed with a few of the magic gifts given to the originals at the beginning of time. She’s a member of a group who has suffered persecution as witches for generations and in discovering her special Guardian, she discovers herself.

Tradition has kept the Paenitentia and Daughters apart until Grace came on the scene and then the shy BBW, Hope, needed to be discovered, too. One book led to another and before I knew it, the fifth book, Guardian’s Patience, was waiting for release.

While the stories take place in the modern world, the Paenitentia aren’t human. Different rules apply. What happens when they walk in sunlight? What about garlic, crosses, and stakes through the heart? How do they survive in the modern world? Do they eat human food? How long do they live and how do they increase their numbers? Do they drink blood? As the first plot evolved, so did the rules, but here’s the thing about making rules in a paranormal world. You have to stick with them and if you’re going to break one of them, you’d better have a darn good (and logical) reason why. Those rules make writing each successive book a challenge as more and more of the Guardian world is revealed.

For me, creating alternate worlds that exist within our real one is part of the fun of writing. Making them believable is part of the work. Having readers tell me they’ve become involved in that world is a big part of the reward.

About the author:

A New Englander by birth and an Ohioan by choice, Jacqueline, known as Jackie by her friends, makes her home in a small, rural town with one lovable husband, one spoiled dog and one disinterested cat. (The adjectives are often interchangeable). An avid reader from a very early age, Jackie has an eclectic taste for books and therefore has trouble naming a favorite genre or author, though she does admit that for pure personal fantasy and 'take-me-away' books, you just can't beat a good romance.

Jackie believes in the beauty of all women and thinks most women don't see themselves as they should (herself included). She tries to make the women in her books reflect the best of 'average' in a variety of shapes, sizes, personalities and backgrounds, and each is beautiful in her own way. Some of her heroes are movie star handsome, while others are not. All her characters are beautiful in the eyes of their lovers and that, to Jackie, is the most beautiful of all.